His idea of a hero is Boomer McBroom's pilot Captain Gentner Drummond, who won a Flying Cross medal for refusing AWACS orders to down a jet that turned out to be a Saudi ally. "Seems he wasn't part of a monolithic Communist plot, and hated the Chinese more than anything else." Horner is savvy about the screwups, the achievements, and the political maneuvering in and after the Gulf War, as leaders and branches of service battled for PR victories. "All we really had to do was befriend Ho," says Horner sensibly. He flew an F-105 Thunderbird "Thud" fighter in the Wild Weasels, the unit with the highest medals-per-aircrew ratio, knew pilots who were stoned to death by villagers, and realized all the bombing did zero good. McNamara confesses his folly in two books, Argument Without End and In Retrospect, but Horner's you-are-there account more vividly demonstrates Vietnam's grim lessons. He loathes the arrogance of the backwards, nuke-happy Strategic Air Command and the madly out-of-touch Vietnam War planner Robert McNamara. Horner is no war cheerleader like General "Buck" Turgidson in Dr. This Tom Clancy real-life military thriller is more nuanced than his novels, because its object is not simply to dramatize armed conflict but to relate the life lessons of his source, jet-pilot-turned-Desert-Storm-air-commander General Chuck Horner.
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